Newport Museum and Art Gallery: archived exhibition web-page here | archived exhibition catalogue and essay here (pdf) - this is different to the online version of the essay here.

The Poetics of Place: Industrial South Wales

The Poetics of Place: Industrial South Wales

This exhibition explores representations of the South Wales industrial scene in the post-'45 period.

The exhibition highlights a populist cultural formation with an iconography of the coalfield as its hallmark: coal-miner, pit-head, slag-heap, miners-cage, steelworks, and terraced row: the iconography of Industrial South Wales now became grist to the mill for the contemporary Welsh artist.

We may say that this phase of painting of the Welsh industrial landscape stands as a counterpart to the earlier cultural achievement of the Welsh industrial novel. / Read more: Essay